Everything, Everywhere

Until recently, the everything bagel was of murky origin. Given its all-inclusive name, you’d think that whoever came up with the idea would have a capacious ego to match. But a few weeks ago the story went public, on the Web site of a small Long Island advertising business run by a man named David Gussin. Gussin, who describes himself as a “struggling altruistic entrepreneur,” claims to have created the everything bagel almost thirty years ago. On the site, he wrote, “It’s the one story my daughter’s friends always found interesting. So I’ll go with it.” As declarations of provenance go, this is less like Philo Farnsworth saying he invented the television than like Forrest Gump saying he invented the smiley face.

As is often the case (Post-its, the microwave), the genesis of the everything bagel was a “fluky-type thing,” Gussin said the other day. When Gussin was fifteen, he took a part-time job at a takeout place in Howard Beach run by a guy named Charlie. It was a simpler time for bagels: you had plain, poppy, sesame, onion, salt, garlic, and—on the exotic end—cinnamon raisin. One of Gussin’s duties at closing time was to sweep up the burnt seeds that had fallen off in the oven during the day. Gussin developed a taste for them, and one afternoon—he guesses around 1980—“instead of throwing them out, like I always did, I swept them into a bin and said, ‘Charlie, let’s make some with these!’ ”

Charlie, who was mildly enthusiastic about the idea, agreed to sell the newfangled bagels for a nickel extra. According to Gussin, the name “everything” came instantaneously. “There was no marketing meeting or anything like that,” he said. “It was a one-second thought process. Boom.” The flavor became popular “the next day,” and pretty soon Gussin’s brainchild—minus the burnt-seed concept—had spread to a bagel place over in Lindenwood. Within a year, Gussin said, “the everything bagel was everywhere.”

Meanwhile, Gussin moved on: he briefly attended college, worked at an employment agency, a shoe store, and a dry-cleaning establishment, and started his company, 516Ads.com. Recounting his post-bagel years, he said, “The everything bagel is my most popular creation, but it’s not my most important one.” He took a pin out of his pocket emblazoned with the acronym “LEARN”: “Let’s End All Racism Now.” Gussin devised the slogan in the eighties, he explained, after seeing skinheads on an episode of “Sally Jessy Raphael.” (“I thought—excuse my language—These people are freaking stupid! Learn!”) Eventually, LEARN, which, like the everything bagel, derives from a melting-pot ethos, was adopted as a teaching tool by public schools in Brooklyn.

Gussin never sought to capitalize on the everything bagel. “Admittedly, you think, Wow, what if I made a penny off of every everything bagel?” he said. “But, realistically, who patented pizza? Who patented the bagel, you know? It never even entered my mind.”

So far, no one has contested Gussin’s claim, setting his invention apart from the radio (Marconi vs. Tesla) and calculus (Leibniz vs. Newton). When asked if he had any hard evidence, Gussin said simply, “It wasn’t around the day before I created it, and it never stopped the day after.” Maria Balinska, who is writing a book called “The Bagel: A Cultural History,” hadn’t heard of Gussin when she was reached by phone in London, but she affirmed that the early eighties was a fertile time for bagel experimentation. “You had more consumption of bagels nationwide,” she said. “It was absolutely the right time to come up with something like that.” She added that Gussin’s creation has not yet caught on in England, proving, perhaps, that you can’t have everything. ♦